Sayang: a love letter from Bali

He looked at me as I had my right cheek on my pillow. For a second, I didn’t care about the blemishes, the scars, or my crooked smile. I looked into his eyes with shyness to meet his gaze. He said, “You’re sad. Don’t be sad.” I never told him I was sad. He just knew.

I’ve been traveling for about a month and a half now. I’ve been spending a lot of time with myself, learning who I really am. It’s incredible how you can surprise yourself with the discovery of your own depths. No one knows you better than yourself, but just like the ocean, much of it is left unexplored until you dig deep. I’m at the stage of life where I want to experience everything. And I mean everything.

I want to see the highest peaks in the world. I want to conquer the ocean depths. I want to see what the world has to offer: the places, the people, the love, the kindness, the peaks, and the troughs. All the good and the bad. Maybe the sadness too. It’s what makes us human. But I’m also reaching the point of narrowing my interests. In the last year, I feel like I’ve tried every sport I encountered and (figuratively) caught every ball thrown at me. I can’t live life as a jack of all trades and a master of none. At some point, I’m going to have to devote more time to what I think is worth pursuing. But what I think is worth pursuing might not actually be what is worth pursuing. Sigh, this is my quarter life crisis.

In the last month and a half, I’ve seen many places and met plenty of people. To my surprise, experiencing everything included magnetic connection. Soulmates, if you will. I think we’re meant to have many soulmates in life. I’d like to think that my best friend, Sofia, and I were destined to meet. She had just transferred to my high school in 2012, and on her first day, our homeroom teacher asked if anyone would like to be her guardian angel, someone who would show her around and be her first friend. I found myself raising my hand up. 12 years later, I can’t imagine life without her. I think she was my guardian angel all this time.

I’d like to think I’ve met another soulmate. Let’s call him Z. I still remember how I felt so drawn to him, even on the very first interaction we’ve had. I still remember the way he lightly fisted my arm after I fired a joke at him when we first talked. There was something ethereal about Z because I immediately knew that I wanted him to be in my life in whatever capacity he could offer. For as long as I had him in my life. I feel like my life would be better with you in it. He and I shared a few hobbies but on different levels. He is a much better surfer than I am. I love the way he raises his right arm with so much power and dominance to balance as he rides his waves down. It’s my favorite thing to watch. Being more advanced than I am, he would surf the bigger swells in the morning while I surfed in the afternoon. I’d get so giddy to go back to surf camp after surfing because I know I’d see him there, all relaxed after his nap and coffee.

As of late, I’ve been running away from big feelings. I’ve felt many big feelings with Z that I still chicken out in admitting. I found myself downplaying them too because I felt like I shouldn’t feel those emotions. When emotions are overwhelming, sometimes you try to shoo them away, right? In fact, it took me two weeks to process them. Feeling your feelings is so darn tough. Accepting and feeling them is like riding a wave. Not acknowledging their existence and shooing them away feels like going against current and being in the midst of a surfing washing machine (by definition, getting rolled under water by a wave). I always have to remind myself that no matter how harsh this world can be and whatever horrible things I’ve had in my past, I can still trust. There’s still some good out there. You don’t even need to find it. It might just be right under your nose.

On the day we met, Z and I decided to grab lunch. At the restaurant, on the other side of a glass wall was a group of Americans having some sort of margarita crawl. Before they left for another bar, a lady stopped by and said, “Hey, my friends and I made a bet about you two. Are you on your first date?” I didn’t know how to answer. I looked at her. I looked at Z. After a few seconds that felt like forever, I figured someone had to answer. I didn’t know what to say but then I answered, “I guess? We just met today.” Someone’s going to have to drink a few shots because of us. To this day, we never really decided if that was a date or not. But we had a lovely time. That’s all that matters, at least to me. I guess we had chemistry from the get-go.

I only spent a few days with Z. Before meeting him, I was going through a very difficult phase of my life. I had just moved out of my apartment in Hawaii, and truthfully, Hawaii felt more like home than the actual home I grew up in. Then, I fell very ill in a foreign country, and I couldn’t even crawl out of bed to walk a few feet to get medicine. I had no one to help me. During the same fiasco, my grandmother had passed, and I couldn’t go home to my family because of immigration reasons. It had been really tough at that point. But then I met Z. He made me laugh like there’s no tomorrow. Like nothing else mattered. For the first time in a long time, when he grabbed my hand to cross the streets of Canggu (which are so ridiculously dangerous), I felt like everything was going to be okay. He’s got me.

With him, I had the feeling of being in the right place at the right time. As if I’m meant to be here. I remember overhearing a conversation that one of my roommates had with her friend. She was telling her friend that connection isn’t dependent on time; the thing, feeling, or experience someone couldn’t give you in three years might be given to you by someone else in three mere days. I don’t disagree.

For a long time, I thought the goal was to feel like my age, 25. Then I thought, what does that even mean? To be 25? A more appropriate goal is to feel like myself the most. To remember how it is to be childlike, even when life tells you to worry about all the things a standard adult has to worry about. One night, Z and I were in our dorm room. I taught him a footwork game I learned when I was younger. He rolled with it, and we were chuckling like we were both 5. Like I found a best friend at the playground. Z spoke English well, even though it is his second language. Some days he struggled to explain his thoughts, but we had one of those connections and understanding that transcended language. When we conversed with friends and he struggled to translate a thought, I loved that he would look at me to finish his sentences for him. Because he knew I understood him. He trusted that I somehow knew how to. A girl he just met.

Now that I’m (temporarily?) based out of Indonesia, I learned a little bit of Bahasa. In Bahasa, sayang means “love”, “dear”, or “beloved”. The same word in my native language, Filipino, means “waste”. Z is my sayang; love that could’ve been, but never did. The thing with time is I keep finding myself in a situation where I wish I have more of it. I used to think that feeling like I’m always running out of time is a bad thing, but with Z, I realized how incredibly lucky I am to feel that way. To pray to the Gods to have more time because life feels so darn good right now. To never want a glorious moment to end. I loved waking up knowing that he was just right by, but I also woke up dreading the day he would leave. That was the first thought every morning. Then he eventually left. So I turned to the waters and waves to drown my thoughts.

So Z, my eyes didn’t lie. I am sad. I’m sad you’ve gone away. But I’m just going to ride the wave of emotions until it turns into white water. Then I’ll get off my surfboard and watch the rest of the waves from the beach. I know you’ll be doing the same from wherever you are.